Reviews

056

Herodotus: The Histories

Trans. by Robin Waterfield
(Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998) 823 pp., $25

Some have called him the Father of History; others, the Father of Lies. His work, combining the charm of a novel and the gravity of historiography, is the most alluringly readable of all great histories. It gives the classic account of the Greeks’ finest hour, in 480–479 B.C.E., when they stood (for once) together and defeated the Oriental hordes of Xerxes, the great king of Persia who had led a mighty invasion of Greece.

Yet many Greeks resented Herodotus’s evenhanded approach to the conflict. He opens his History with a promise to record the “marvellous achievements both of the Greeks and of the barbarians” (that is, non-Greeks) and to “give them lasting glory.” He also does not fail to record the squabbles, disagreements and discreditable motives of the various Greek cities. But in regard to the triumph over Persia, many Greeks wanted to read something much simpler and more unambiguous, a straightforward eulogy of their most glorious achievement. For his irritating impartiality Herodotus was called “barbarian-lover,” a term carrying some of the venom of “nigger-lover,” familiar from the old racist days in the United States.

Then there is the question of his truthfulness, or of his credulity. He tells wonderful stories, but some of them seem more like folktales than historical accounts; others involve the supernatural.

Take, for example, the famous tale of Polycrates of Samos and his ring. Polycrates was so successful and prosperous that his ally Amasis, king of Egypt, took fright: The gods, ever jealous of human success, would not tolerate a run of such unbroken good fortune. Amasis advised Polycrates to make a point of sacrificing something especially dear to his heart, to avert the malignancy of heaven. So he had himself rowed out to sea, threw into the waves his prized signet ring and returned sadly to his palace. Soon a fisherman appeared at his gate with an exceptional catch: a fish so splendid that it could only be set before a king. And when the belly of the fish was cut open, there Polycrates found his ring. With his offering so ominously returned to him, his ruin was clearly imminent. Amasis learned of Polycrates’s misfortune and immediately dissolved their friendship: It would be far easier to mourn the loss of a stranger than that of a close friend. Eventually, an enemy lured Polycrates onto the Greek mainland, where he met with a dreadful end, dying on a cross, all despite his daughter, who had foreseen his fate in a dream and begged him not to go.

Now, Polycrates was a real person, flourishing a hundred years before Herodotus’s time, and the historian had indeed been to Samos and admired Polycrates’s engineering marvels. (Among these was the remarkable tunnel, which Herodotus describes in detail and which can 057still be seen, in part, today.) But the ring and the dream are obviously not “history,” in the same sense as Herodotus’s accounts of Xerxes’s invasion and the Battle of Salamis.

Some scholars argue that the historian occasionally claims to have been to places he knew only from report and hearsay. As for the places he did visit, the argument goes, Herodotus’s reports at times differ markedly from sober historical reality. And yet he is also capable, especially in the second half of his work, of writing narrative that must be taken, with few exceptions, as pure history. He is, in fact, a most slippery customer, whose innocent manner has led many scholars to assume that they are far more sophisticated than the man they are studying, and much cleverer, too. But, all too often, their learned commentaries and analyses somehow fail to do justice to the wily historian, with his extraordinary mixture of the mythical, the anthropological and the straightforwardly historical; the frustrated modern scholar finds himself, at the end, having done no more than place a dull book beside Herodotus’s fascinating one.

His Histories (the Greek word meant “enquiries”) presents the second classic case—Homer’s poems being the first—of a great work of Greek literature appearing, as far as we can see, out of nowhere. Herodotus had predecessors, as had Homer; but what survives of the work of these earlier historians never suggests anything remotely resembling the range, scale, structure or sheer interest of Herodotus. With his work there appears, full-blown, one of the two main types of historical writing: the inclusive approach, with its wide range of interest and detail. Herodotus tells us himself: “My History has sought out digressions, from the beginning.” The other kind of historical writing, narrowly focused and exclusive, was invented a few years later by his younger contemporary Thucydides (c. 460–400 B.C.E.). Thucydides is an ostentatiously rational, not to say scientific, historian, interested in nothing but politics, economics and war. There are no colorful myths, and human motivation is essentially restricted to the pursuit of wealth and power. In his austere pages no woman ever speaks; his history contains no delightful chapters, laden with spicy details, on the customs of exotic peoples, as is 058Herodotus’s speciality.

Among the Babylonians, Herodotus tells us, every woman must, once in her life, have intercourse with a stranger in the sanctuary of the goddess of love, accepting whatever fee he chooses to offer. A plain girl may have to wait a long time before she finds a taker; “in fact some of them have to wait three or four years.” That, says Herodotus, is a shameful custom. Another Babylonian custom, however, meets with the historian’s approval: Once a year all the girls of marriageable age in each village were put up for auction, the prettiest among them presented first; the money that the rich men of the village paid for their attractive new wives was then spent in a kind of reverse auction, in which other men (“commoners who wanted wives and were not interested in good looks”) were induced to take the unattractive ones. In this way all the girls found husbands.

But in one important respect Herodotus comes closer to our idea of scientific history than does Thucydides, who typically gives the reader only one interpretation of historical events: He has weighed the evidence, and he presents us with his considered view—take it or leave it. Herodotus, by contrast, constantly reminds us of the difficulty of deciding which version of events to accept, often giving us several different accounts of the same story along with their sources. How we wish, sometimes, that Thucydides would do the same! The seemingly tangential information about foreign peoples is precious to us as well.

Herodotus would agree with Alice: What’s the use of a book without conversations? He reserves space for full-length conversations, in which women, and even little girls, have their say. Thus it was, for instance, that when the Ionian cities of Asia Minor (now the Aegean coast of Turkey) were planning their revolt against Persian rule, they sent an envoy to Sparta to ask for aid. In his interview with the Spartan king, the envoy kept raising the amount the Ionians were prepared to pay for Spartan assistance, until finally the little Spartan princess Gorgo, who was in the room unobserved, piped up: “Daddy, if you don’t get away from this stranger, he is going to corrupt you”; and so the Ionian envoy was sent away from Sparta; and he went on to Athens; and there he addressed the popular assembly of the Athenian citizens and succeeded in persuading them to come to the Ionians’ aid—a decision that they lived to regret; so much easier it is, comments Herodotus dryly, to persuade thousands of men than to persuade one man.

Herodotus presents the background of the great Persian invasion in the first half of his work, which in his artfully artless hands contains priceless information about the previous century in Greek history as well as accounts of the Persian Empire and its most important provinces. These include Babylon, Egypt and the lands of the Scythian nomads of the north, who smoked hemp and milked mares and worshiped the war god, Ares, whose sacred image—the Scythians are so barbarous—was a rusty sword stuck in the ground.

He has a lot to say, too, about the Lydians and their king, Croesus, who thought himself the most blessed man alive, and who was defeated by Cyrus, King of Persia, and put on a pyre to be burned alive; but in the 061despair of his final hour he called out the name of the wise Greek Solon, who had once tried to show him that the life of an Oriental despot, however opulent, was less desirable than the more moderate existence of a Greek citizen, a member of a community; and though Croesus had simply laughed at this before, now he saw that it was true; and Cyrus was moved to pity, realizing that he was burning alive a man very much like himself; and a providential shower of rain put out the fire, and Croesus’s life was saved.

Throughout his long book, Herodotus never quite lets us lose sight of his great theme: the clash of two ways of life and the defeat of Eastern despotism (despite the heroism of many Persians) by free men. “Look at my enormous army,” says King Xerxes to the exiled Spartan renegade Demaratus. “The Greeks won’t even stand and face them—especially as they don’t have men with whips behind them, as my men do, to drive them on.” “Oh yes, they will,” comes the answer. “They have a master whom they dread much more than your slaves dread you. That master is the Law.” And so it was.

Robin Waterfield’s new translation bears the marks of a labor of love. His prose style maintains an admirable level for the main body of the work, though perhaps he, like most of Herodotus’s translators, finds it hard to do justice to the highest points of a stylistic range that can seamlessly pass from the conversational to the elevated and, at times, to the grand. Nevertheless, the book is a pleasure to read. It is also equipped with a perceptive and illuminating 50-page introduction, by classicist Carolyn Dewald of the University of Southern California, that is well worth reading. With notes, maps, chronological charts and a handsome format, the volume provides everything the reader needs. Neophytes, whether English or American, can begin their Herodotus here.

Herodotus: The Histories